How to Apply to Doctors Without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières Canada

12 min read Last updated April 20, 2026 4 open positions
Blake Crosley
Blake Crosley Researched using publicly available information, hiring data, and ATS analysis.

Key Takeaways

  • MSF is a 25-section international federation coordinated from Geneva, with about 63,000 staff worldwide of whom 80 to 90 percent are nationally hired, and an annual budget of roughly two billion euros that is 96 to 98 percent privately donated.
  • Apply through the MSF section in your country of residence (for example doctorswithoutborders.org in the U.S., msf.org.uk, msf.ca, msf.org.au, msf.or.jp), not through msf.org directly, for international field roles.
  • First missions are typically nine to twelve months in locations chosen by MSF, frequently in active conflict, epidemic, or post-disaster settings, with no guarantee of placement near family or in preferred regions.
  • Compensation is intentionally modest and roughly equal across the international pool: first-mission field staff typically earn around 1,200 euros per month plus a per diem, accommodation, insurance, and travel, scaling slowly with experience over multiple missions.
  • Headquarters and section-office salaries (Geneva, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Barcelona, New York) are more competitive with the wider NGO market but are still well below private-sector benchmarks, and locally hired national staff salaries are set by local labor markets and are often dramatically lower than expatriate compensation.
  • Selection emphasizes credential verification, language ability, austere-medicine experience, security discipline, emotional resilience, and explicit alignment with the MSF Charter; interviews probe these dimensions directly and bluntly.
  • MSF practices acceptance-based security with strict no-weapons and no-armed-escort rules, and operates in places where kidnapping, injury, illness, sexual violence, and death are real and disclosed risks; candidates must engage honestly with that reality to advance.
  • The organization's identity rests on the dual mandate of confidential medical care and public temoignage (bearing witness), and its independence from government funding is what allows it to speak when other agencies cannot.
  • Most candidate attrition happens after offer or after the first mission, when people fully internalize the compensation, the deployment realities, and the moral weight of the work; the organization openly accepts this and recruits accordingly.

About Doctors Without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières Canada

Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), known in English as Doctors Without Borders, is the world's largest independent international medical humanitarian organization, providing emergency medical aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, natural disasters, and exclusion from healthcare in more than 70 countries. The organization was founded in Paris on 22 December 1971 by a group of French doctors and journalists, including Bernard Kouchner, Max Recamier, and others, who had served with the Red Cross in Biafra during the Nigerian civil war and grown frustrated with what they saw as humanitarian neutrality that required silence in the face of atrocities. They wanted an organization that would deliver medicine without regard to race, religion, creed, or political affiliation, and that would speak out, or 'bear witness,' when populations were being deliberately harmed. That founding tension between confidential medical neutrality and public temoignage (witness) remains the defining characteristic of MSF's identity more than five decades later. Structurally, MSF is not a single organization but a movement of 25 national associations and sections coordinated through MSF International, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. The five 'operational centres' (Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Geneva, and Barcelona) plan and run the field missions, while partner sections in places such as the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Hong Kong, South Africa, and Brazil recruit international staff, raise funds, and represent MSF publicly. Approximately 63,000 people work for MSF worldwide, and roughly 80 to 90 percent of them are 'national staff,' meaning they are hired locally in the country where the project operates. International mobile staff (still often called by the legacy term 'expats') represent a comparatively small share of the workforce and are typically the doctors, surgeons, nurses, anesthesiologists, midwives, logisticians, finance and HR coordinators, and project coordinators who deploy on assignment for nine to twelve months at a time. MSF received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999 'in recognition of the organization's pioneering humanitarian work on several continents,' and the prize money helped seed the Access Campaign, which fights for affordable medicines and diagnostics in low-income countries. The annual budget now sits at roughly two billion euros and, critically for the organization's identity, around 96 to 98 percent of that budget comes from private individual donors rather than governments or institutional funders. That funding independence is what allows MSF to operate, and to publicly criticize, in places where its donors' governments are belligerents. Recent and current operations include massive emergency responses in Sudan and the wider region during the ongoing civil war, in Gaza and the occupied Palestinian territory, in Ukraine since the 2022 Russian invasion, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (one of MSF's largest and longest-running country programs), in Yemen, Haiti, Myanmar, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Syria, and across the Sahel. Candidates considering MSF should understand that they are joining a deliberately spartan, deliberately outspoken, deliberately apolitical-but-not-silent movement, not a conventional NGO.

Application Process

  1. 1
    Identify the right MSF section to apply through, because MSF is a federation rat

    Identify the right MSF section to apply through, because MSF is a federation rather than a single employer; international mobile field staff apply through the MSF section in their country of residence (for example, doctorswithoutborders.org for the United States, msf.org.uk for the United Kingdom, msf.ca for Canada, msf.org.au for Australia, msf.or.jp for Japan, aerzte-ohne-grenzen.de for Germany), and the recruiting section then sponsors you onto a global pool that the operational centres draw from.

  2. 2
    For international field positions, apply via the recruiting section's 'Work with

    For international field positions, apply via the recruiting section's 'Work with us' or 'Join the field' page, which lists the profiles MSF actively needs (typically anesthesiologists, surgeons, OB-GYNs, ICU nurses, midwives, mental health professionals, epidemiologists, water and sanitation specialists, logisticians, supply specialists, finance coordinators, HR coordinators, and project coordinators); the application requires a CV, a long-form motivation letter, professional references, proof of clinical credentials and licensure, and detailed information about availability for a first mission of nine to twelve months.

  3. 3
    If your profile matches a current need, expect a multi-stage selection process:

    If your profile matches a current need, expect a multi-stage selection process: a recruiter screen, written exercises or scenario questions, one or more competency-based interviews (often with a returned field worker and a recruiter), reference checks, medical clearance, and for some profiles a security and stress assessment; total time from application to placement on the international pool typically runs three to six months.

  4. 4
    Once accepted onto the international pool, you complete a pre-departure preparat

    Once accepted onto the international pool, you complete a pre-departure preparation course (variously called PPD, Welcome Days, or Preparation Primary Departure depending on the section) that covers MSF's charter, security management, project cycle, logistics, and intercultural work; you are then matched to a specific opening in a specific country, which can take weeks or many months depending on profile scarcity and your constraints.

  5. 5
    Headquarters and section office positions (in Geneva, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam

    Headquarters and section office positions (in Geneva, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Barcelona, New York, Toronto, Sydney, Berlin, Tokyo, and other cities) are recruited separately through each section's careers page; these include communications, fundraising, finance, IT, legal, advocacy, medical advisor, operations support, and HR roles, and they follow a more conventional application-interview-offer flow without the field deployment requirement.

  6. 6
    National staff positions, which make up the large majority of MSF jobs worldwide

    National staff positions, which make up the large majority of MSF jobs worldwide, are recruited locally by the country mission's HR coordinator and posted on the country page of the relevant section website, on local job boards, and through community networks; recruitment is conducted in the local language and prioritizes nationals of the country where the project operates.

  7. 7
    MSF maintains specialized rosters for short-notice emergency deployments (Emerge

    MSF maintains specialized rosters for short-notice emergency deployments (Emergency Pool, Emergency Response Unit, Emergency Surgical Unit), and field workers with prior MSF experience can opt into these rosters for assignments that may deploy in days rather than weeks; first-mission candidates almost never go directly to emergency pool roles.

Resume Tips for Doctors Without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières Canada

recommended

Lead with verifiable medical credentials for clinical roles: full medical or nur

Lead with verifiable medical credentials for clinical roles: full medical or nursing degree, current and unrestricted licensure (with country and license number), board certification, residency and fellowship details, and any tropical medicine, emergency medicine, or humanitarian health diplomas (DTM&H, DiMM, DMCC); MSF will not accept candidates whose credentials cannot be primary-source verified, so ambiguity here ends an application.

recommended

Document languages honestly using a recognized framework (CEFR levels A1 through

Document languages honestly using a recognized framework (CEFR levels A1 through C2, or ILR for U.S. candidates); fluent French and English are effectively a baseline for most international assignments because the operational centres in Paris, Brussels, and Geneva work in French and many missions in West and Central Africa run in French, while Spanish opens missions across Latin America, Arabic across the Middle East and North Africa, Portuguese in Mozambique and Angola, Russian across former Soviet states, and Swahili across East and Central Africa.

recommended

Make austere-medicine and resource-limited experience explicit: MSF screens for

Make austere-medicine and resource-limited experience explicit: MSF screens for candidates who can practice without subspecialty backup, advanced imaging, reliable power, blood banks, or an intact supply chain, so highlight rural rotations, mission hospital electives, military or deployed medicine, prior humanitarian assignments with ICRC, IRC, MdM, IMC, UNHCR, or WHO, disaster response, refugee health, and any work in conflict-affected, post-disaster, or low-resource settings.

recommended

State your real availability up front, in your own words: MSF first missions are

State your real availability up front, in your own words: MSF first missions are typically nine to twelve months, surgical and anesthesia missions can be as short as four to six weeks, and emergency deployments may be three to six months on short notice; candidates who hedge availability or who cannot commit to a full first mission rarely advance, and being honest about constraints (children, partner, parents, debt, license maintenance) is preferred over vague optimism.

recommended

Emphasize team leadership in adverse conditions, not just clinical volume: case

Emphasize team leadership in adverse conditions, not just clinical volume: case counts and procedure logs matter, but MSF places equal weight on supervising national staff, training local clinicians, managing a ward or operating theatre with rotating teams, working through interpreters, handing over to a successor, and writing situation reports; framing prior experience around team building and capacity transfer is read as MSF-ready.

recommended

Show evidence of mission alignment with the MSF Charter and the principles of im

Show evidence of mission alignment with the MSF Charter and the principles of impartiality, neutrality, independence, and bearing witness; candidates whose materials read as 'voluntourism,' resume building, or political mission tend to be screened out, while candidates who can articulate why they accept MSF's specific operating model (no armed escorts, transparent acceptance, willingness to speak publicly about what they witness) advance.

recommended

For non-clinical international roles (logistician, water and sanitation, finance

For non-clinical international roles (logistician, water and sanitation, finance coordinator, HR coordinator, project coordinator, supply chain), foreground concrete technical skills (Kobo, ODK, fleet management, generator and cold-chain maintenance, borehole drilling, vaccine campaigns, Saga or Unifield financial systems, payroll in non-banking environments) and any experience operating without reliable internet, electricity, banking, or rule of law.

recommended

Keep the CV to two to four pages in a clean single-column format, chronological,

Keep the CV to two to four pages in a clean single-column format, chronological, with explicit start and end dates including months, no graphics or photos for sections that prohibit them, and a concise motivation letter (one page, French or English depending on the recruiting section) that names the specific contexts and profiles you are offering yourself for; recruiters skim hundreds of applications per cycle and clarity beats design.

ATS System: Section-specific (multiple ATSes)

MSF does not use a single global ATS; each of the 25 national sections runs its own recruitment system, which means application portals, account creation, and tracking differ by country of application. MSF USA (doctorswithoutborders.org) uses a Workday-based careers portal for headquarters and field staff applications. MSF UK (msf.org.uk) uses a custom recruitment workflow with role-specific application forms. MSF Canada (doctorswithoutborders.ca) uses a custom application system with separate field and HQ tracks. MSF Australia (msf.org.au), MSF Japan (msf.or.jp), and most European sections use a mix of custom forms and section-specific applicant tracking platforms. Headquarters roles in Geneva, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, and Barcelona are typically posted on the relevant operational centre's careers page and follow that section's ATS. National staff roles are recruited locally by the country mission, often using local job boards, paper applications, and community networks rather than any centralized ATS. Candidates should expect to create separate accounts for each section they apply to and should not assume that a profile in one country's system is visible to recruiters in another.

Complete Section-specific (multiple ATSes) Resume Guide →

Interview Culture

Interviewing with MSF feels different from interviewing with almost any other large employer, and candidates who prepare for it as if it were a hospital or NGO panel often misread the room.

The process is designed less to test clinical or technical knowledge (your credentials are verified separately) and more to probe whether you understand, accept, and can survive inside MSF's specific operating model. Recruiters and returned field staff are looking for candidates who are emotionally stable, self-aware, allergic to drama, able to function inside a strict security framework, comfortable with hierarchy in the field even when they outrank their team coordinator on paper at home, and able to hold the moral weight of working in places where you cannot fix what you are seeing. Expect direct, sometimes blunt questions about your worst experiences, your tolerance for ambiguity, your relationship to authority, and your reasons for wanting to do this work; vague humanitarian idealism is a yellow flag. Security awareness comes up in almost every interview, often through scenario questions: how would you respond to a checkpoint demanding to search your vehicle, what would you do if a colleague broke a security rule, how do you feel about an evacuation decision being made for you by a coordinator you have never met, how would you handle being told you cannot leave the compound for two weeks. The right answers are not heroic; they are procedural. MSF runs on acceptance-based security (being known and trusted by all parties to a conflict) and on strict no-weapons, no-armed-escort rules, and the organization needs candidates who will follow protocols even when their clinical instincts scream to do otherwise. Candidates who present themselves as fearless, who minimize past traumatic experiences, or who imply they would 'do whatever it takes' are read as security risks rather than assets. The field-versus-headquarters tension is real and will surface in interviews for both tracks. Field staff often perceive headquarters as slow, risk-averse, and disconnected from the realities of project life; headquarters staff often perceive the field as reactive, undisciplined about reporting, and resistant to standardization. Interviewers will ask how you have navigated similar tensions before and how you would handle an HQ decision you disagreed with from the field, or a field demand you considered unreasonable from HQ. The cultural ideal MSF describes for itself is direct, sometimes argumentative, allergic to corporate speak, and committed to a kind of professional humility about what humanitarian medicine can and cannot accomplish; candidates who speak in NGO platitudes or who frame themselves as saviors generally do not progress. Finally, expect explicit conversations about danger, kidnapping risk, sexual violence, mental health, and the realistic possibility that you will be evacuated, injured, traumatized, or killed; MSF will not soften these conversations, and your willingness to engage with them honestly is itself part of the assessment.

What Doctors Without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières Canada Looks For

  • Verified clinical or technical credentials (medical, nursing, midwifery, anesthesia, surgery, pharmacy, lab, mental health, epidemiology, public health, logistics, water and sanitation, finance, HR) with current licensure and primary-source-verifiable training.
  • At least two years of post-qualification professional experience for most international clinical profiles, with explicit experience in resource-limited, austere, or high-acuity settings; first-mission acceptance is competitive and prior humanitarian or low-resource exposure is heavily favored.
  • Working fluency in at least one MSF working language beyond your own (typically French for many African missions, Spanish for Latin America, Arabic for MENA, Portuguese for Lusophone Africa, Russian for former Soviet states), and willingness to learn new languages on assignment.
  • Demonstrated willingness and ability to deploy for nine to twelve months on a first mission, often to remote, dangerous, or politically unstable locations selected by MSF rather than the candidate, with limited ability to predict or control the placement.
  • Acceptance of and active alignment with the MSF Charter (impartiality, neutrality, independence, medical ethics, bearing witness) and with the operational rules that flow from it, including no armed escorts, no embedding with militaries, transparent identification, and disciplined adherence to security protocols.
  • Emotional and psychological resilience demonstrated through prior high-stress work, with self-awareness about coping mechanisms, support systems, and limits; MSF actively screens out candidates who appear to be using a mission to escape personal crisis.
  • Team and supervisory experience, especially across cultural and language differences, including mentoring and capacity-building of national staff who will remain in country long after expatriate rotations end.
  • A genuine humility about humanitarian work: candidates who can say plainly what they cannot do, what they are uncertain about, and where they expect to fail are read as far more MSF-ready than candidates who present themselves as universally capable.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does MSF pay international field staff, really?
Compensation is intentionally below market and is set by the recruiting section, but as a working baseline a first-mission international field worker can expect roughly 1,200 euros per month (sometimes quoted in local currency equivalents) plus a per diem of a few dollars per day, accommodation, insurance, vaccinations, travel to and from the field, and emergency evacuation coverage. Pay scales slowly with completed missions and accumulated responsibility, and senior coordinators on multi-year contracts earn meaningfully more, but no one joins MSF for the salary. Offers are commonly declined, and contracts commonly not renewed, when candidates fully understand the compensation.
Are headquarters jobs in Geneva, New York, or Paris paid more competitively?
Yes, but still modestly relative to the private sector or to similarly skilled UN positions. Section-office and operational-centre roles in Geneva, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Barcelona, New York, Toronto, Sydney, Berlin, and London are paid on local NGO scales adjusted for cost of living, with benefits typical of the country. Geneva HQ roles are closer to UN-adjacent compensation but with a flatter ceiling, and most senior leadership at MSF earns far less than equivalents at large international NGOs or UN agencies. Compensation transparency is part of the culture, and salary grids for many sections are published or available on request.
What is the actual security risk of working for MSF?
It is real, it is disclosed, and it is non-trivial. MSF works in active armed conflicts (Sudan, Gaza, Ukraine, Yemen, Myanmar, eastern DRC, Sahel), in epidemics (Ebola, Marburg, cholera, measles), and in places with weak rule of law, and the organization has lost staff to airstrikes (most notoriously the 2015 Kunduz hospital bombing), shootings, kidnappings, road accidents, and disease over its history. MSF mitigates risk through acceptance-based security, strict no-weapons rules, evacuation procedures, and disciplined movement, but it does not eliminate it. Candidates are required to engage honestly with this risk during selection, and the organization actively screens out applicants who minimize it.
Can I choose where I am sent on a first mission?
In practice, no. You can state preferences and constraints (language, climate, family situation, license maintenance, religious or cultural considerations), and the recruiter will try to honor them, but placement is driven by operational need and your specific profile. A candidate with French and Arabic and surgical training may be matched within weeks to a specific country, while a candidate with only English and a more common profile may wait months for a suitable opening. Refusing too many proposed assignments without strong reason can result in being held in the pool indefinitely or removed.
What does the time between missions look like?
MSF strongly encourages, and for some profiles requires, an inter-mission rest period of at least two to three months between assignments, both for psychological recovery and to allow time for debriefing, training, and personal logistics. Some sections offer paid 'breakdown' time and a structured psychosocial debrief on return; others provide it on request. Career field workers commonly do six to nine months in the field followed by two to four months at home, repeated over years. Burnout and secondary traumatic stress are openly discussed risks, and the organization invests meaningfully in mental health support for returned staff.
Why do offers get rejected, and why do people quit after one mission?
Both happen often, and MSF treats them as expected rather than as failures. Offers are commonly rejected when candidates fully internalize the compensation, the nine-to-twelve-month deployment, the inability to choose location, and the security reality. Post-first-mission attrition typically reflects a combination of pay, distance from partners and family, the cumulative emotional weight of working in places where you cannot fix what you are seeing, mental health impact, and incompatibility with the spartan, sometimes argumentative culture. The organization openly accepts a meaningful first-mission attrition rate and recruits to it.
Do I have to be a doctor to work for MSF?
No, and clinicians are actually a minority of any given mission's expatriate team. MSF recruits internationally for nurses, midwives, anesthesiologists, surgeons, OB-GYNs, mental health professionals, pharmacists, lab technicians, epidemiologists, public health specialists, logisticians, water and sanitation engineers, biomedical technicians, supply specialists, finance coordinators, HR coordinators, and project coordinators. Non-medical roles, especially logistics, water and sanitation, finance, and HR, are some of the highest-need profiles in many missions, and candidates with strong technical skills and austere-environment experience are very competitive even without a clinical background.
What is the difference between national staff and international staff, and how do I apply as a national?
National staff are hired locally in the country where a project operates, are typically nationals of that country, work in their own communities, and form 80 to 90 percent of MSF's global workforce. They are recruited by the country mission's HR team in the local language, often through the relevant section's country page, local job boards, professional networks, and community outreach. Compensation is set against the local labor market and is typically far lower than expatriate compensation, though it is generally competitive within the local NGO and health sector. Long-term, national staff are the backbone of MSF's continuity in any given country, and many take on senior coordination roles.
What is temoignage, and will I be expected to speak publicly?
Temoignage, French for 'witness' or 'testimony,' is the principle that MSF will speak publicly about what its medical teams see when populations are being deliberately harmed, when access is being blocked, or when patterns of violence and neglect rise to the level of mass suffering. In practice, public statements are coordinated by MSF communications and advocacy teams, not by individual field staff acting alone, and most field workers will not be asked to speak in their personal capacity. However, candidates are expected to accept that their work may inform public statements, that the organization may take positions their own government opposes, and that confidentiality of patients is absolute even when the organization speaks.
Does MSF accept volunteers, donate-your-time clinicians, or short-term medical missions?
Generally no, and this is a deliberate position. MSF runs on paid professional contracts, even at intentionally low compensation, because predictability, accountability, continuity of care, and team cohesion all suffer with volunteer turnover. Short-term medical missions, brigade-style deployments of two to four weeks, and donate-your-time models are not how MSF operates and are not a way to enter the organization. The realistic entry path is through formal recruitment for a first mission of several months, supported by the section in your country of residence.

Open Positions

Doctors Without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières Canada currently has 4 open positions.

Check Your Resume Before Applying → View 4 open positions at Doctors Without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières Canada

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Sources

  1. Medecins Sans Frontieres - Official International Site —
  2. Doctors Without Borders / MSF USA —
  3. Work with MSF UK —
  4. MSF Canada Careers —
  5. MSF Australia - Work with MSF —
  6. MSF Charter and Principles —
  7. 1999 Nobel Peace Prize - Medecins Sans Frontieres —
  8. MSF International Activity Report (annual) —